Attention! Now viewing an image online could hack into your computer

Who would have thought that an innocent looking image file might prove to be a disastrous intruder in your personal computer?

In the new age digital world, inventions and discoveries have to be scrutinized in and out to find out their hidden attributes. One can’t be sure if a discovery is ever entirely beneficial or not.

As reported by motherboard.vice.com, Saumil Shah, a security researcher from India has devised a technique called “Stegosploit” through which a hacker could hide malicious code inside the picture’s pixels. The technique that he has put to use is known as ‘steganography’. It consists of stashing secret text or images in a different text or images.

Shah calls it the “magic sauce” behind Stegosploit. In this case, the malicious code or exploit is encoded inside the picture’s pixels, and it’s then decoded using an HTML 5 element called Canvas, which allows for dynamic rendering of images.

“I don’t need to host a blog, I don’t need to host a website at all. I don’t even need to register a domain,” Shah told Motherboard, during the demo last week. “I can take an image, upload it somewhere and if I just point you toward that image, and you load this image in a browser, it will detonate.”

The malicious code, which Shah calls “IMAJS,” is a mix of image code and javascript hidden into a JPG or PNG file. Shah hides the code within the picture’s pixels, and from the outside, unless you zoom a lot into it, the picture looks just fine.

Admitting that the technique might not work everywhere, Shah adds that he, himself hasn’t fully tested his technique on known image sharing sites such as Imgur or Dropbox,. The malicious file has to be uploaded without an extension for the browser to be tricked into rendering it, and some sites, such as Dropbox, don’t allow that. Moreover sites like Facebook reprocess the images when they are uploaded, causing the loss of the malicious code, according to Shah.

Still, Shah believes it’s just a matter of time and that “these techniques are coming, sooner or later.”

The incidence and prevalence of cardiac disease continues to increase every year. However, improvements in prevention and treatment require better understanding of electrical behaviour across the heart

stress cardiac MRI can not only diagnose heart disease, but can also predict which cases are potentially fatal. Pixabay

Researchers have developed a new software that could spot potentially lethal heart diseases and may lead to improvements in prevention and treatment, says a new study.

The software – ElectroMap – which measures electrical activity in the organ, is a new open-source software for processing, analysis and mapping complex cardiac data.

The study showed that the heart’s pumping ability is controlled by electrical activity that triggers the heart muscle cells to contract and relax. In certain heart diseases such as arrhythmia, the organ’s electrical activity is affected.

Arrhythmia is improper beating of the heart too fast or too slow.

Stress cardiac MRI leads to fatal heart disease. Pixabay

“We believe that ElectroMap will accelerate innovative cardiac research and lead to wider use of mapping technologies that help prevent the incidence of arrhythmia,” said Kashif Rajpoot, Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham Dubai.

“This is a robustly validated open-source flexible tool for processing and by using novel data analysis strategies we have developed, this software will provide a deeper understanding of heart diseases, particularly the mechanisms underpinning potentially lethal arrhythmia,” Rajpoot added, published in the journal, Scientific Reports.

The incidence and prevalence of cardiac disease continues to increase every year. However, improvements in prevention and treatment require better understanding of electrical behaviour across the heart, the study noted. (IANS)